Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  ‘Someone at the Scotus Clinic, perhaps?’ Jack drummed his fingers on the table. ‘I’ve got to say, I don’t know whether there’s anything here for Torchwood or not. It still sounds more like a shared delusion, or some tropical disease to me, pheromones and super-strength or not. We’re set up to look for signs of alien activity in the area and stop it. I just don’t see the evidence here.’

  Toshiko looked over at Gwen. Her boyfriend was infected. If anyone was going to push Jack into investigating this, it had to be her.

  Owen and Ianto gazed at Gwen as well, waiting for her to react.

  ‘It might be alien influence,’ she said, as if it were only her and Jack at the table, ‘or it might be something more mundane. Either way, we need to find out. I think we should investigate the Scotus Clinic, and then make a decision based on what we find there.’

  ‘Does Rhys remember enough about the clinic that he can draw us a map? Always useful to know where you’re going.’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ she said.

  By the time Jack and Gwen had made their preparations, looked at blueprints and plans, checked out their weapons, argued over who was going to drive the SUV and then made their way, still bickering, through the Cardiff traffic to the office block that housed the Scotus Clinic, it was lunchtime. The lobby was crowded with men and women in smart office-wear, either heading out for coffee and sandwiches or back to their offices. People in green coveralls were watering the various plants and vines that were placed strategically around. The air was filled with the incessant ping of lifts arriving.

  Jack looked around. There was something about lobbies that never changed. He’d been in hotels and office blocks from the nineteenth century all the way through to the forty-ninth, on a panoply of planets between Earth and the Horsehead Nebula, and it was always the same. People rushing around trying to look important, grabbing food on the move. Nobody taking time to sit down and relax, sip a cocktail, close their eyes and daydream for a while. Everyone had somewhere better to be, and they never seemed to get there.

  The lifts were separated from the rest of the lobby by a glass wall. Booths embedded in the glass allowed people in and out via rotating glass doors, but only if they placed some kind of identity card in a slot. Gwen was standing in front of the glass, trying to make out the company listing on a big board by the lifts.

  ‘Tolladay Holdings,’ she read. ‘Sutherland amp; Rhodes International, McGilvray R amp;D, Rouse and Patrick Financial… ah! The Scotus Clinic. Floor Twelve. Looks like it occupies the entire floor.’ She glanced at the booths, then at Jack. ‘How the hell are we going to get in? Have you got some alien device that will override the security on these doors?’

  ‘Even better,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got money.’

  He strode across to the rose marble desk that sat in the centre of the lobby. A man in security guard’s uniform sat behind the desk. His name tag read ‘Martin’. He watched Jack approach with professional distrust.

  ‘Hi,’ Jack said. ‘Look, I could spin you some kind of story about a snap health and safety inspection, or something equally implausible, but we’re both busy men and we haven’t got time to dance around. Let’s cut to the chase. How much money will it take for you to let us through to the lifts?’

  The man’s face folded up into a scowl. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘That entirely depends on whether you find the concept of hard cash inherently funny.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘You ain’t getting in there.’

  ‘Five hundred of your quaint British pounds.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Six hundred.’

  ‘It’s more than my job’s worth, mate.’

  ‘Sitting in a lobby being ignored by everyone who walks past isn’t a job, it’s just a way of watching your life slip away. Did you grow up wanting to be a security guard in an office block? Did you lie awake at night dreaming about handing visitor’s passes out to stressed people turning up late for meetings? Seven hundred.’

  ‘Look — who the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘Come on, I’m on a tight budget here. Seven hundred and fifty pounds, and that’s my final offer. Take an evening class. Follow your dream.’

  Martin looked around. Nobody else was paying any attention to them. Catching Jack’s eye, he glanced meaningfully down at something just below the level of the desk, then back again. ‘I ain’t got time for this,’ he said loudly, and turned away. Jack leaned over and felt around with his fingers. There was a box down there, on a shelf hidden by the desk’s surface, and there were four or five things like credit cards in the box. He scooped two of the cards out, replacing them with a thick envelope he’d taken from a pocket in his coat. ‘Nice doing business with you,’ he said. ‘Hope the rest of your life works out OK. Drop me a line, OK?’

  Gwen watched him return with an expression of disbelief on her face. ‘Firstly, that was bribery. Secondly, did that envelope really have seven hundred and fifty pounds in it? Thirdly, if it did then how did you know that’s how much it would take?’

  ‘Funny thing,’ Jack said; ‘it always ends up at seven hundred and fifty pounds with security guards, no matter where we start off. Must be a union thing.’

  He tossed a card to Gwen. Choosing a moment when the lift area was momentarily unoccupied, they went through their booths together.

  The lift doors opened on the twelfth floor to reveal a hall area with a deep carpet in neutral brown, hessian weave wallpaper and some unthreatening abstract paintings. A door to the left identified the Scotus Clinic in large sans serif letters.

  Gwen pushed the door open.

  The lobby of the clinic was empty, apart from several comfy chairs in a waiting area, three doors, the right-hand one labelled ‘Doctor Scotus’, and a vacant receptionist’s desk. Jack knew straight away that the place was deserted. There was a feeling, or rather, a lack of feeling to places that weren’t being used. They were missing something: an energy, a vibration, a background hum. It was like the difference between a sleeping person and a corpse; they looked the same, at first glance, but you could always tell them apart.

  Sleeping corpses were a problem, of course, but Jack had worked out different methods of identifying them. And they didn’t turn up that often.

  ‘I think we were expected,’ he said, looking around. ‘This place has been abandoned. And pretty recently.’

  Gwen moved across to the right-hand door. ‘Rhys said he talked to Doctor Scotus himself. We ought to start in there.’ She knocked twice on the door. ‘Just in case,’ she murmured.

  ‘Politeness costs nothing,’ Jack agreed. ‘Unlike security passes, which are quite pricey. I need to start cutting back on the bribes. I’ve almost blown this month’s budget.’

  ‘No answer,’ Gwen said. She pushed the door. It swung open, revealing a shadowy office. If there were windows in there then they were covered by curtains or blinds. She stepped inside, quickly being swallowed up by the darkness.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Jack said, still looking around the lobby.

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘Why is it there’s a Scottish pound note, but there’s no Welsh pound note?’

  ‘Mmmm!’

  Gwen came staggering back through the door into the lobby, hands clawing at her neck. Something was wrapped around her throat, something about as thick as Jack’s thumb but with a wildly thrashing tail. Something coloured black, with vivid blue stripes encircling its body.

  And it was throttling the life out of Gwen.

  FIFTEEN

  Toshiko rubbed her eyes for what felt like the thousandth time. They were gritty and hot, and rubbing them just made them feel worse, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was like scratching an itch, or sneezing: a reflex action that couldn’t be suppressed.

  ‘The problem with this place,’ she muttered, ‘is that I never know whether it’s day or night outside. The world could end, and I’d be completely unaware.’ In fact, she added silently, wi
th Jack out there, the chances that the world could end in the next few hours were probably a lot higher. Things tended to happen when he was on the loose.

  Her computer screen was still, infuriatingly, showing patterns of numbers as the processor crunched away at integrating the continuous readings from the hand-held scanner into a single coherent picture. It had been working for several days now, and gave every indication that it might churn away until the end of the world. Whenever that turned out to be.

  Bored, she leaned back in her chair and gazed around the Hub. She still remembered the crazy mixture of feelings she had experienced when Jack had brought her in for the first time: terror at the huge responsibility that she had been given; pride that she had been chosen; excitement at the prospect of examining technology that no human had ever seen before; and, bizarrely, distaste at the place she would be spending her working life. The Hub was buried beneath Cardiff’s Millennium Centre area, built in and around the crumbling remains of an old water pumping station, and remnants of the old Victorian architecture were everywhere to be seen. The walls were perpetually damp, and the very lowest level of the central area was several inches deep in water that, in summer, usually hosted a colony of mosquitoes. At least, she hoped they were mosquitoes. Jack had once told her the water was actually home to the last survivors of a civil war on a planet of very small insectoid aliens. She hadn’t believed him, of course, but come the summer she did stop swatting them. Just in case. No point in provoking an interstellar incident by accident.

  Ianto was stood up by the Boardroom, fiddling with the coffee machine again. Seeing her looking up at him, he called down: ‘Tosh, can I get you a coffee? I’m trying Jamaican Blue Mountain today.’

  ‘Thank you, but no,’ she said.

  He turned back to the coffee machine. Toshiko was about to change her mind when she realised that the flickering of the computer screen in the corner of her eye had stopped. The processor had finished its job.

  The screen was filled with a coloured display of a human body. Marianne Till’s body. It wasn’t an accurate representation — Marianne had been moving around while scanning herself with Toshiko’s device — but more of a computer-generated representation based on the information from the scanner. Following Toshiko’s instructions, the computer had mapped the data onto a standard human grid, legs slightly apart and arms held out from the sides, palms out. The picture was coloured according to the density of the material that was present in the body: bone was white, fat yellow, muscle red, with other colours winding in and around them to represent the rest of the stuff that bodies tended to be made up of: tendons, voids, lymphatic fluid, brain matter and other things that Toshiko couldn’t even name. She could turn the body through any orientation, remove layers progressively until there was nothing left or slice through at any angle to get a cross-section of Marianne’s body. Setting aside for a moment the sheer amount of time it had taken, it was actually a pretty impressive system. She would have to show Owen. He might be able to find a use for it.

  A flash of crimson somewhere near Marianne’s abdomen caught Toshiko’s eye. She zoomed the image in. The area running from the stomach through the intestines to the bowel was effectively a void within the body: a space that might be empty or might be filled with solid or liquid matter, but either way it should always have a different density from the surrounding tissue. The problem was that Marianne’s digestive tract seemed to be blocked by something that had a density close to that of muscle. It was coming up as red on the image. For a few moments, Toshiko thought it was a glitch in the software, but it was too localised, too self-contained. A tumour, perhaps? She was no expert — that was Owen’s department — but she was pretty sure that tumours manifested themselves as lumps, not as long, thin, sinuous objects that wound all the way through the upper and lower intestines, terminating at one end in the stomach and at the other in the bowel.

  And tumours didn’t have a mass of smaller tentacles, as thin as cotton, emerging from one end in a cloudy mass.

  Toshiko leaned back in her chair, feeling her stomach suddenly rebel at the thing on the screen.

  There was something alien in Marianne’s stomach.

  Something alive.

  Gwen felt the creature cutting into her neck. She could hardly get a breath past the constriction in her throat. Staggering backwards out of Doctor Scotus’s office, she tried to call to Jack for help, but she couldn’t get the words out.

  Her head felt swollen with blood. Her eyes were bulging. A few seconds more and she was sure they would pop out of their sockets, the pressure was so intense. With every beat of her heart, spikes of pain were being hammered into her temples.

  The world started turning grey around the edges. She managed to get her thumb between one loop of the creature and her skin. She tugged at it, trying to loosen the creature’s grip, but it just kept tightening and her thumb was trapped with its circulation cut off.

  One end of the creature’s body waved in front of her face, thin strands of white erupting from a blue-ringed body, flat on three sides. The white hairs seemed to be aiming themselves at her face, like an albino medusa, except that she felt like she was turning to jelly rather than rock.

  The door jamb hit her as she staggered sideways, but the pain was minor compared with the noose of fire that was tightening around her neck. All she could see now was a grey tunnel with the office very small and very far away at the centre of it. Tiredness washed up her arms. She just wanted to give up and fall asleep.

  Something was fumbling at her throat, and it took a few seconds before she realised that it was Jack. She tried to tell him that it was all too late, too far away and too much trouble, but he didn’t seem to understand. Something went bang, a long way in the distance, and then bang again, and she was being spun around. The pressure on her throat relaxed, and pain flooded up through the nerves, the veins and the arteries until her neck was incandescent with agony. She fell to her knees, retching, face burning and sweat coursing down her cheeks and forehead. Acid burned her mouth as she vomited thin strings of mucus onto the carpet. Firm hands were on her shoulders. She was being turned around again, slowly this time. Jack’s face swam into sight through her searing hot tears.

  ‘Last time I held a girl’s head while she threw up,’ he said comfortingly, ‘it was too many hyper-vodkas rather than an alien worm thing that did it. I think the after-effects actually lasted longer. Nice girl — I think she went on to become President of somewhere. Or something.’

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Gwen coughed.

  ‘See for yourself.’ Jack helped her up, one arm around her shoulders and the other supporting her beneath her arm. She leaned gratefully against him. The warmth and the musk of his body enveloped her, a smell compounded of spice, leather and sandalwood. Her face touched the side of his neck, and she had to smother the sudden desire to lick his skin, tasting him.

  ‘What’s a hyper-vodka?’ she asked, trying to distract herself. ‘Is it some kind of cocktail?’

  ‘Oh it’s some kind of cocktail all right.’ Jack’s hand released its grip on her arm, but he still held her around the shoulders. ‘Feeling OK?’

  ‘Nothing a neck transplant wouldn’t fix.’ Gwen’s eyes suddenly focused, and the world came into existence around her. They were back in the foyer of the Scotus Clinic. Directly ahead of her was the receptionist’s desk, and attached to it, thrashing back and forth, was the most bizarre creature Gwen had ever seen. For a moment she thought there were two or three of the creatures all entwined together, all struggling to escape, but she quickly realised that there was only one of them. It had three sections, black with irregular blue rings the colour of cigarette smoke. They were triangular in cross-section, and joined together in the centre like a Catherine Wheel. Each section terminated in a mass of writhing white fibres. Two of the sections were stuck somehow to the desk, and the creature was thrashing around with a sound like paper being crumpled.

  ‘I’m thinking of call
ing it Ringo,’ Jack said. ‘On account of the rings. I know it’s corny, but I kinda think it’s appropriate. It just doesn’t look like a Brian to me. Or a Kevin.’

  ‘What did you do to it?’

  ‘I stapled it to the desk.’ Jack reached down and picked a chunky electric stapler from the floor, something designed for fastening hundreds of sheets of paper together. A lead ran from the stapler to a socket in the wall. ‘Found this on a shelf. Thought it was a weapon of some kind. If I’d actually considered the matter carefully I would have wondered what a personal assistant was doing with a weapon but, hey, maybe Doctor Scotus kept trying to get her bent over the photocopier. Anyway, it worked well enough for me to staple the thing to the desk.’

  ‘That’s… not of this Earth, is it?’

  He looked carefully at the stapler. ‘It says Rexel. Maybe that’s the planet where it was built.’

  ‘I meant the creature.’

  ‘Oh, that is definitely not only not of this Earth, it’s not of this solar system or even this arm of the galaxy.’

  ‘Then how did it get here?’

  ‘Slipped through the Rift, I expect. Although probably not in that form.’

  ‘What is it — some kind of guard dog?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I reckon it was left behind by accident. It looks like Doctor Scotus and his team left in a hurry. When you’re feeling up to it, we’ll search the place.’

  Gwen eyed the creature warily. ‘Leaving Ringo here?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘It’s not going anywhere.’ He stepped forward, grabbed the one free segment of the creature and wrestled it down to the desk, then brought the power stapler round and held it just below the writhing mass of white fibres. Bang, and all three of the creature’s sections were fastened down, leaving only the central hub free to flex and thump against the desk. ‘Especially not now.’

  Casting nervous glances over her shoulder at Ringo — the name had unfortunately stuck in her mind — Gwen followed Jack back into the office, flicking on the light switch as she did so. Part of her was waiting for something to leap at her throat with a sound like rustling paper, but nothing happened. Jack just kept walking, oblivious.